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User: SkOink

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  1. Only under the right circumstances on Cops With Google Glass: Horrible Idea, Or Good One? · · Score: 1

    I would completely support Google Glass on police if (and only if) there are penalties to the participating police departments for 'accidentally' losing the footage or having a 'malfunction'. These two things both sem to happen at a shocking rate whenever a policeman is accused of misconduct.

  2. Jefferson on Goodbye, California? Tim Draper Proposes a 6-Way Split · · Score: 3, Interesting

    No comment on whether or not the state of Jefferson would ever be able to support itself without the rest of California, but Tim Draper didn't pull that particular state out of the ether. I have some parents that used to live up in North State, and the hill folk there love the idea of Jefferson.

    They even have a website: http://www.jeffersonstate.com/

  3. Water on NASA Will Send Seeds to the Moon In 2015 · · Score: 2

    The moon is pretty dry. If if this is supposed to be some proof-of-concept for growing food in a lunar base/colony, don't they need to address the larger issue of where such a garden would get its water?

    If we have to transport the water to the moon as well as all of the raw materials (dirt, plant nutrients), what possible savings could there be against just stocking a base with MREs?

  4. re: I'm ready to replace Make on GNU Make 4.0 Released · · Score: 1

    I'm not sure what to use to replace Make though. I'm a Python guy so I would probably want Scons or something like that, but Ruby fans probably want Rake, Java fans probably want Ant, and in general I don't think there is any consensus on what might be the best replacement for Make

    I went back and forth on different Pythonic build tools for awhile. Scons is pretty great if you're doing 'standard' sorts of builds, but I found it a little heavy for my tastes and really hard to customize to my tool flow (in FPGA land, there are all kinds of nonstandard vendor tools that all need to play together).

    I've been using doit more and more over the past few months, and I'm continually impressed by the tool (aside from the goofy name). It works amazingly well for automating tricky/exotic build processes.

    Check it out! http://pydoit.org/index.html/

  5. Only some of the story on Nasdaq Fined $10M Over Facebook IPO Failures · · Score: 1

    Why is it that whenever people talk about how this-or-that stock market action has "cost investors millions"? It's not like the money was lit on fire. It either never existed in the first place, or somebody won big off of somebody else's poor decisions. Isn't stock trading a zero-sum game by definition?

  6. But I drink a ton of coffee! on New Study Links Caffeinated Coffee To Vision Loss · · Score: 1

    Not sure what those researchers wrote - I don't see any problem here!

  7. What would I get for it? on Would You Pay an Internet Broadband Tax? · · Score: 2

    I'm not fundamentally opposed to paying a broadband tax, but what would I get for it? I would happily pay a 5% tax if it meant that my broadband received government-imposed price controls, minimum bandwidth guarantees, and net neutrality.

  8. Re:People should pay for their choices on California City May Tax Sugary Drinks Like Cigarettes · · Score: 1

    There are definitely biological factors in weight loss, but it's absolutely 100% true that weight loss is controlled by the food that you eat.

    Consider it this way:
    1) Moving and thinking require calories.
    2) Calories are obtained from food and drink.
    3) If you consume less calories than you use, you will lose weight.

    If there are any biological differences at work at all, the only one would be "you're better at digesting food than other people". It's funny how we consider a "worse" metabolism to be the one that is better at extracting chemical energy from food.

    Calories on a label are not the same thing as calories digested and used/stored. So keep in mind you might be extracting more chemical energy than somebody else from the same 150-calorie soda.

    With all that said, however, it's still true that lowering your food intake to a point where you burn more calories than you absorb is the only way you'll ever lose weight. It takes several hours of jogging to burn off the calories of a single extra-"value" meal. When you put it into the context of three hours of daily jogging to make up for one bad meal per day, you can appreciate that diet matters much, much more than exercise.

  9. Re:Really? on In America, 46% of People Hold a Creationist View of Human Origins · · Score: 1

    It's bad enough that these businesses in the US exist to collect donations which go to pay for their land, buildings and the ridiculously high salaries of priests, preachers, pastors or whatever they want to me called and do it all tax-free because it's "religion." But they go on to insult the whole educational process in every way possible by asserting things without evidence or experiment or verification of any kind. Some people even get real PhD's in this crap.

    Although I'm philosophically inclined to agree with you, you're misrepresenting some facts.

    1) Most of the ministers and pastors I've ever met are paid about on-par with school teachers in the same area, which is to say "not much". There's the occasional mega-pastor of a mega-church who rakes in the dollars, but that's nowhere near the reality of most clergy members.

    2) It's true that some clergy get a masters or even a PhD in theology, divinity, biblical studies, or something similar. However, I don't know that it's any more or less valuable than getting a PhD in something like History, English, Art, or any other kind of humanity. Even if you consider bible scholars to be a studying a fictional book, it doesn't make them any different than any other PhD that studies something fictional or mythological.

    3) There are lots of Protestant ministers out there who don't believe in creationism. Many intellectuals in the religious community treat the bible as a collection of books written by people, some of which are more truthful than others. I've never met a well-educated pastor that believed every word in the bible came directly from God.

  10. Re:Common Execution Runtime on Why Desktop Linux Hasn't Taken Off · · Score: 1

    "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."

    Elsewise known as the scariest 9 words in the english language.

  11. Interesting question for the judge to ask on Oracle and Google Spar Over Whether Programming Languages Can Be Copyrighted · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I have to admit, I'm impressed with the judge's question. I'd agree that this is really what's at the heart of the matter, and I'm glad that the judge is asking it. It certainly seems like he's taken the time to do his homework into programming languages and computing.

  12. Doubt it on Expect a Flood of Competitions As US Tries To Spur Public Inventions · · Score: 2

    Expect innovation to dwindle until such time as a garage-shop inventor doesn't need to worry about getting sued for patent infringement.

  13. Re:Uh, no on How To Crash the US Justice System: Demand a Trial · · Score: 1

    I can't speak for every state out there, but in the state of California 0.08 is the limit over which you are drunk, not the limit under which you aren't drunk.

    You can get charged and convicted of a DUI with a BAC under .08, it's just that other evidence needs to be provided (field sobriety test, testimony given to police, etc). A BAC of .08 just means you're guilty without question or any need for other evidence.

  14. Question for the MINIX team on MINIX 3.2 Released With Some Major Changes · · Score: 1

    Since I'm assuming somebody on the MINIX team posted this article:

    Are there any plans to add real-time extensions to MINIX? I know that ARM support is in the works - with that and hard (or even soft) real-time extensions, it could sweep the embedded world in a big way.

  15. Similar to... on Why the Number of O's In LOL Matter On YouTube · · Score: 1
  16. Re:Fuck The Whole Damn Lot on White House Responds To SOPA, PIPA, and OPEN · · Score: 1

    When it comes to Wikileaks, the freedom of the internet and the cancerous copyright law we now have, there is no such thing as a voice of sanity in the government. The only reason I'm voting for Obama again is because I know that whatever loonie the Republicans rally behind will put up the exact same platform (with the added bonus of fucking social services and civil rights).

    This is depressing.

    That mentality is what let our country get to the state it's in right now. As a nation, we need to stop playing "lesser of two evils", and start voting for third party candidates. Any third-party candidates. It doesn't even matter which ones.

    In a nation where (D) and (R) are both (F)'ing us in the (A), continuing to vote for whichever one will screw us _less_ is a sort of tragedy-of-the-commons kind of scenario. It makes sense as an individual choice, but when the entire country thinks like this we get the mess we're in now.

  17. The Design of Everyday Things on Ask Slashdot: What Do You Like To Read? · · Score: 1

    I guess Donald Normand's "The Design of Everyday Things" is on the border of "technical", but I'd say it's on the "non-technical" side of the border. It's a fascinating book that goes into detain on how we perceive information, store things in our memory, and interact with the world. I'm enjoying it a lot.

  18. Summary is wrong on 25% of Car Accidents Linked to Gadget Use · · Score: 1

    The actual study says that 25% of accidents are caused by distracted driving, not by gadgets per-se. Their list of distractions include (among other things):

    1) Vehicle controls/displays.
    2) Food.
    3) Scenery / roadside features.
    4) Daydreaming.

  19. Magnet links? on BitTorrent Chat Demystified · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I must be a bit confused about how exactly a magnet link works. In order for me to access the magnet stream for a file I wanted to download, I would need a magnet link pointing to somebody who was serving the file, right?

    What happens when the person who the magnet link references turns off their computer? If the magnet link needs to "check in" and update itself on a regular basis to prevent against this, what makes it functionally different than hosting a .torrent?

  20. Nice tactics on Apple Plans New Spaceship-like Campus · · Score: 0

    What I took from that presentation was essentially:
    1) Apple wants to build a monument to itself.
    2) Apple is intending to bully the city of Cupertino into allowing it, using their continued presence in the town as leverage.

  21. Alternative reactor designs on A New Class of Nuclear Reactors · · Score: 1

    Another promising reactor design is the pebble-bed reactor. Its reaction has a negative temperature coefficient, meaning that the reaction self-moderates if it gets too hot, rather than requiring an external control system to prevent meltdown. This means that if the cooling system were to fail, the reactor would just sit in a mostly-dormant state until cooling was re-established.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor/

  22. Placation on TSA To Retest Full Body Scanners For Radiation · · Score: 1

    Does anybody really expect that the TSA would admit that their scanners are dangerous and then remove them? No way. Not after the hundreds of millions of dollars they've spent buying them. I guarantee their tests will show that everything is A-OK regardless of what the truth might actually be.

  23. Re:Applications? on The World's First Flexible Organic Microprocessor · · Score: 1

    I would assume the big advantage comes in new applications benefiting from their flexibility, such as the pipe pressure sensors mentioned in the OP. While I agree there's no need to worry about saving space, there could be significant cost reduction and easier complexity if you could actually build your microprocessor on the same flexible substrate as your pressure sensor.

  24. I can't say I'm surprised. on Huge Amounts of Oil Found On Gulf of Mexico Floor · · Score: 2

    The Deepwater Horizon oil spill released over 6 times as much oil as the Valdez did. Very little of it was actually cleaned up. Of the oil which even made it to the surface, mostly BP just dumped enough dispersants down to cause the oil to sink back down to the ocean floor. Where exactly did people think it was going to go anyways?

  25. Re:Persistent myth? on Why You Shouldn't Reboot Unix Servers · · Score: 1

    For the record, in the embedded world it's pretty common to see malloc() used without free(). The use case is providing pointers with memory blocks during program initialization.